Recommended Resources

I’ve set up this page to answer many of your questions about what we use to live and work remotely as Digital Nomads.

Everything on this page, we (ie my girlfriend and I) personally use and pay for. I will never recommend anything that I don’t think is valuable, the only thing I ask is if you’re going to sign up for it anyways, please use my links so I can get credit for referring you.

I also suggest you bookmark this page and revisit every now and then as I will continue to update this page with new recommendations as I find them.

Apps

I use both UpWork and People Per Hour to find freelance work. Each are a little different but they both offer a platform to find a lot of work. UpWork, I believe is the biggest and the one I find the most work from. People Per Hour is biggest in the UK.

Nicetalk on the other hand, is probably the easiest way to make money online (if you’re an English speaker, that is). All you have to do is use your phone to talk to Chinese people in English – that’s it. Obviously, there are some guidelines but pretty much any English speaker can do this job. For a flat-rate of $10 USD per hour, you could probably use this app to earn a full-time income if you stay in an inexpensive city. I use it every now and then to earn a bit of side income.

We’re long term travellers and so we usually can’t afford to stay in hotels and neither would we decide to otherwise. Hotels are built for short stays but with AirBnB, we’ve found ideal spots to stay for weeks at a time, often at less than $25 AUD per night.

I highly recommend AirBnB to anyone who is travelling both domestic and abroad. Apart from the times where we’ve secured monthly stays, AirBnB has been a lifesaver and has allowed us to plan ahead and feel secure.

You can think of TakeMeTour as the AirBnB of tours in Thailand. With hundreds of tours available, the website offers the largest collection of day tours in the region.

We used TakeMeTour during our first month in Chiang Mai to book a day tour up to Doi Inthanon National Park. The booking process was seamless and our tour host was super communicative and punctual on the day of the tour.

After we got back from the tour, I realised that perhaps the best thing about TakeMeTour was the piece of mind knowing that you were getting the best price on a secure platform. Much like AirBnB, it’s nice to have a large company administering these small business owners and freelancers, meaning that you’ll always have support if an individual provider does not live up to standard.

Udemy is another great website that I use but unlike Lynda, Udemy is a course-marketplace so you need to be more critical of the instructors and check their ratings before purchasing individual courses.

These three are probably the most popular websites for beginners to learn code and starting out, I definitely tried all of them.

Code Academy is free and really good but the library is somewhat limited. The other two, Code School and Team Treehouse both offer a free trial so I’d suggest giving them all a go and seeing which ones you enjoy most.

Uber is the most globally available ride-sharing app in the world while Grab is our go-to app for travelling in Asia.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of ride-sharing, basically both of these apps allow you to book a freelancer with his own car to provide transport within a bunch of cities around the world. It’s much like booking a taxi except so much more efficient, easy and cheaper.
For Grab, you either book a ‘GrabTaxi‘ or a ‘GrabCar‘ depending on your preference and availability in your city. Both are super convenient when it comes to avoiding miscommunications with foreign speaking drivers while completely eliminating the risk of getting ripped-off.

Freedom Self Publishing is my friend Adrian’s course on how to publish books on Amazon. It’s the system that I followed to produce my own book ‘How I learned to Code‘ and it’s a strategy that I believe has a lot of potential with still a low barrier to entry.

Books

This book is an absolute must-read for anyone considering the digital nomad lifestyle. If you haven’t read it yet, click here now! It’s required reading.

No book has inspired more digital nomads than this one book and although technology has evolved a lot since the book was written in 2007, this book has opened up a lot of people’s mind to the possibility of what many consider the new way of doing business. I call it ‘The Future of Work’

Both books are much like memoirs however the first book, ‘12 Weeks in Thailand‘ offers a lot of advice around living cheaply in Thailand, where to go to train in Muay Thai and how to get started with becoming a divemaster.

Although I don’t do Muay Thai or Diving myself, I found ‘12 Weeks in Thailand‘ really interesting and was a good read just before heading over to Chiang Mai in April 2016.

Johnny’s second book, ‘Life Changes Quick‘ picks up where ‘12 Weeks in Thailand‘ drops off. This is where Johnny explains how he made the switch from physically working in Thailand to earning income online and becoming location independent. This book, I think, is shorter than the first but it’s packed with inspiration for those wanting to earn good money online and live or travel in Thailand.

Both books are an interesting read and I found Johnny’s openness to share his deepest thoughts and emotions really refreshing.

Of course, I recommend my own book ‘How I Learned to Code‘ to anyone considering a career in Web Development. It’s the story of my 11 month journey from taking my first Ruby on Rails course to working remotely in Bali. Within, I also share my best advice for following a similar path.

Website Hosting

I can’t remember where I got the recommendation from initially but so far, I’m very happy with the quality and service of this Perth-based hosting provider.

Before I started with Netorigin, I had to sign up multiple times to different hosting providers in order to create different websites. Now that I have a reseller account, I simply open a new account each time I try out a new website and doesn’t cost me any extra.

Netorigin has been a supportive and reliable platform and I would recommend to others, especially if your business is based in Australia.